Comcast, net neutrality advocates to square off Monday

Big thinkers on net neutrality and big players in the war between P2P users and Comcast will face off this Monday at a public hearing at Harvard Law School on "broadband network management practices." The Federal Communications Commission has classified the event as an "en banc" meeting. For people who have not studied legal French, that means that all five FCC Commissioners will attend.

The unusual gathering comes during the last days of an FCC proceeding on whether Comcast has violated agency policy by interfering with P2P applications like BitTorrent, and the Vuze corporation's request that, if so, "reasonable boundaries" be put on ISP gatekeeper power. Both Comcast vice president David Cohen and BitTorrent chief technology officer Eric Klinker will speak at the hearing, but on different panels. Proponents of establishing fair boundaries for Comcast and other ISPs will present at the meeting. They include MIT professor Daniel Weitzner, Marvin Ammori, general counsel of Free Press, and Columbia Law School professor Timothy Wu, the latter a long time advocate of net neutrality.

In August of 2003 Wu and Stanford professor (and possible Congressional candidate) Lawrence Lessig filed a statement with the FCC that warned of trouble ahead without a clear set of network guidelines. "First, guaranteeing a neutral network eliminates the risk of future discrimination, providing greater incentives to invest in broadband application development today," they wrote. "Second, a neutral network facilitates fair competition among applications, ensuring the survival of the fittest, rather than that favored by network bias."

Harvard Law School professor Yochai Benkler will appear on one of the hearing's two panels. Benkler's best selling book, The Wealth of Networks, also supports net neutrality, but suggests that the policy will not go far enough. "Network neutrality would keep the physical infrastructure a technical bottleneck, owned by a small number of firms facing very limited competition," Benkler writes, "with wide legal latitude for using that control to affect the flow of information over their networks."

Benkler advocates powerful open wireless networks, owned by users, "shared as a commons, and offering no entity a bottleneck from which to control who gets to say what to whom."

Skeptics of establishing limits on network power will also comment at the hearing, among them Christopher Yoo, whose 2006 essay "Beyond Net Neutrality" argues that the policy "would place the government in the unfortunate position of picking technological winners and losers." Wu and Yoo have debated each other in academic journals. Industry representatives will include Verizon vice president Tom Tauke and Sony Electronics VP Scott Smyers. Both companies have filed in the P2P proceeding, Verizon against regulation and Sony in favor.

The FCC's public notice lists Massachusetts state Rep. Daniel E. Bosley (D) as a speaker on the event's first panel. Rep. Edward Markey (D-MA) will make an appearance at the hearing as well. Two weeks ago Markey submitted his Internet Freedom Preservation Act (H.R. 5353) to the House, which would establish a "national broadband policy" that prohibits "unreasonable discriminatory favoritism for, or degradation of, content by network operators." The proposed law would require the FCC to monitor network behavior by holding eight public summits on the problem within a year after enactment of the bill.

The Harvard hearing will open with a technology demonstration presented by Gilles BianRosa, CEO of Vuze. The FCC will stream audio of the event and archive a video file later; Ars will be at the hearing and will have a comprehensive report after it concludes. The hearing begins at 11 am (EST) and will conclude at four.

The FCC's proceeding on the Comcast/P2P fight is scheduled to conclude on Thursday, February 28th. But the Progress and Freedom Foundation has requested a two-week extension for filing comments, arguing that interested parties will need more time to respond to remarks and presentations made at Monday's hearing.

Matthew Lasar / Matt writes for Ars Technica about media/technology history, intellectual property, the FCC, or the Internet in general. He teaches United States history and politics at the University of California at Santa Cruz.